New pride and joy - XFX Radeon 7870

[tb2571989]

My gaming desktop at home was always a bit of a mishmash of bits, bundles and case from Maplins, hard disk and RAM from eBuyer. It's no way obsolete with a Athlon II X4 Quad-core 2.8GHz CPU and 4GB RAM (the RAM issue has been held back a bit by the fact the board only has two RAM slots and it's hard to find DDR2 in more than 2GB capacity). My previous graphics card was a XFX Radeon 5450, which I picked up a couple of years back for about £50 which ran what I wanted to play (Battlefield 2 and 2142, Minecraft, Supreme Commander) reasonably. It started to show it's age a bit as World in Conflict wasn't the best on framerates and Just Cause 2 was a slideshow and Crysis 2 and Battlefield Bad Company 2 were unplayable. Over the summer break I splashed out a bit and got a XFX Radeon 7870 from Novatech - first "proper" graphics card and probably the most I've ever spent on a single computer component. Plus a 600W modular Novatech PSU (which are apprently rebadged OCZ or Corsair ones) to power it and well, I'm chuffed to bits.

Blows through Just Cause 2 at 75FPS + and I'm looking forward to throw Battlefield 3 at it soon as well.

It's a lot bigger than I was expecteing and unfortunately covers 3 out of 4 SATA ports on my motherboard so the DVD drive has become a casulty. I'm looking at getting a new board - first I was confused when the specs of my CPU said it was a AM3 while board said it was a AM2 socket before I realised the AM3 ones are backwards compatible. And a new ATX instead of mATX board will help with MOAR RAM slots.

For scale, this is the old card (bottom) vs new card (Top).
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[chazzy2501]

Asus M5A97 (£60) or the pro (£80) and buy new DDR3 ram (£42) as is cheaper than buyin more DDR2. You could probably get a nice OC from that CPU as well.